Tuesday, 23 June 2015

What happens when a wannabe rockstar does a lightning talk?

"Ladies and gentlemen! Are you ready for the coolest rockstar in the world?" The crowd roars its approval.

"Are you f***ing ready to rock?" The crowd goes wild...

Ok. That's not how it happened for me. That is what I wanted to happen, when I did my lightning talk at the Nordic Testing Days 2015. Actually, it went something like this:

Helena Jeret-Mäe get's on the stage. "Next we have Pekka Marjamäki on the topic of Testing Tuesday", she says. Then I get up from the floor and walk in front of the room full of people. I have my hat full of badges, my Superman t-shirt, suspenders handing down, all cool and ready to rock the place.

"OK, people!" I start my performance. I divide the room into two groups. "The group on this side shouts 'TES' and the group on this side shouts 'TING'. Ready? Tes-ting! Tes-ting!"

The crowd starts shouting. They shout "testing". "Louder!" I shout. The room is roaring for a minute or so! Then at it's peak, I silence the crowd and start my talk on Testing Tuesday.

Testing Tuesday doesn't sound that weird. It is a concept me and my colleague Petri Sirkkala from Solita came up with. It spawned from a need to teach testing at my company. I will explain how it goes in detail (accompanied with a video, perhaps) in a later post. In the Nordic Testing Days 2015 I briefly introduced the concept. It is 7 weeks every Tuesday, each week having a workshop of it's own and helping our colleagues with their testing problems. The most recent blog post is a write-up of the 6th Testing Tuesday workshop. Apart from actually helping people test, strange things happen during the Testing Tuesdays, e.g. us two testing dudes walking around the office shouting "Testing Tuesday" and playing Sex Pistols from an old cassette player, or posting testing problems on a white board in the hallway.

The main goal of Testing Tuesday is to promote testing and to sow seeds of interest into people who aren't yet that much into testing. The second goal would be to help people in their testing related challenges. The third one is to have fun.

I think my objective at the Lightning talk was to convey the energy and enthusiasm we pour into the Testing Tuesday. The attitude to fight against poor practices, the bravery to stand up and challenge, the eagerness to improve. Honestly I can't remember what I actually said during the talk, I had so much fun. I do believe that people got the key points out of my talk.

Be open about your passion towards testing.

Share knowledge and help others.

Be brave and have fun.

"We want more! We want more!" The crowd shouted after my talk... At least I wanted it to. Alas, it didn't...